


ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον

by sovay



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Backstory, Classical References, Gen, Multi, While on a Boat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 15:19:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15342687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: "Perhaps it's just as well your husband has his hammock in the fo'c's'le," said Hannibal Sefton, surveying the neatly made bunk of theTriton's passenger cabin with an expression of gravest doubt. "I fear we could both take the floor for the night and there still wouldn't be room."





	ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον

**Author's Note:**

> Set early in _Crimson Angel_ (2014). Spoilers for _Dead and Buried_ (2010).

"Perhaps it's just as well your husband has his hammock in the fo'c's'le," said Hannibal Sefton, surveying the neatly made bunk of the _Triton_ 's passenger cabin with an expression of gravest doubt. "I fear we could both take the floor for the night and there still wouldn't be room."

Rose Vitrac January found it difficult to disagree. The sheets on the bunk were clean, which was almost more than she had expected from an American brig sloop ferrying Kentucky furs and corn from the shifting mouth of the Mississippi to Cuba; it was also built for an occupant as slim as herself and very likely shorter. The thought of Ben trying to fold his broad-shouldered six-foot-three into a space she might well stretch and stub her toes in was at once poignant and hopelessly appealing, but the papers they had forged in New Orleans put her husband forward with the crew and his supposed fellow slaves, the unmarried valet of M'sieu Sefton, while Rose in her role as prize concubine would sleep the next few nights beside her temporary master, if the two of them could determine how to share the narrow lodgings without elbowing each other in the eye. At least in private she could wear her spectacles again, and loosen her tobacco-colored hair from its compulsory tignon; on deck she had worn the fashionable madder-pink gown borrowed from Ben's sister in her best imitation of the plaçée she had escaped becoming, but at the moment she would have traded all its silk satin and ribbons for the room to put her feet up and read. She said dubiously, "We may have to take turns as it is. I don't suppose you brought any Vergil? I'll play you _sortes_ for it."

"The one game of chance," Hannibal sighed, "at which you know I wouldn't cheat. No, I'm afraid I left the arms at home and brought only the man. Speaking of which—"

Rose shook her head, one hand easing the tight knot of hair at the nape of her neck. "You'll have to break it to Benjamin. A fine Tristan and Iseult we are."

The fiddler's mouth quirked under the rakish fringe of his mustache, greying like his plaited hair; he did not even need to gesture for Rose to know what he was thinking. Even in the dry spells of his consumption, Hannibal's wrists were skinny enough for Rose to circle with her own long fingers, his shins sharp beneath his coat-skirts and his cheekbones conspicuous enough to pass him for Baron Samedi, if that loa ever took a fancy to ride a fiddle-scraping white man with a long-cherished education in the classics and an only recently renewed acquaintance with sobriety; his face with its corners and creases was as dear to her as her _beau noir_ husband's, but a picture of heroic male beauty he was not. "More like Death and the Maiden. _Und rühre mich nicht an—_ " She started to counter with Death's reply— _Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebild_ —but he was already offering alternatives with comic hopefulness, having taken her indrawn breath for argument: "Miranda and Caliban? Galatea and the Cyclops?"

"Oh, Athene and Odysseus, at least!"

The smile flickered out of the fiddler's face as suddenly as if she had not answered him at all, and inside her head she heard the echoes falling into place as inevitably as the last feet of a hexameter—much-traveled, long-suffering, charmer of women from sea-nymphs and sorceresses to shy princesses and goddesses with skeptical grey eyes; the trickster teller of Cretan tales, with a wife and child who thought his bones long lost and rolling in the deep sea-swell—just as Hannibal said lightly, "How it would have disappointed faithful Penelope to find that she had waited twenty years for a beggar after all."

Her spectacles were sliding down her nose, but she did not raise a hand to touch them back into place. Even during that brutal winter when Benjamin accompanied him silently through the night streets of New Orleans and Rose sat patiently beside him through the cold-sweating days while the last of thirty years' liquor and laudanum shuddered their way out of his system, the fiddler had never mentioned his wife to her at anything other than the second hand appropriate to a well-bred cousin and always lost love; Rose could imagine her only as the mirror and original of Hannibal's son, a kind of silver-fair Diana to the Apollo that was Gerry Stuart, that bright, no longer so careless boy she had met just once at his own wedding two years past. _Descended from angels, the lot of them,_ Benjamin had quoted his friend once on the subject of Philippa's family, the fiddler's own sardonic, hungover self pointedly excluded. _No man with a heart could have stood to see her unhappy,_ Hannibal himself had remarked to her at another time, with the dreamy bitterness that marked most of his conversations that season, _and even her husband was not so lacking in the sentimental faculties as to exempt himself from their number, though I'm not sure you could have said the same of his critical ones._ She had not challenged him then or afterward, knowing the lie as transparent as mosquito-bar for the one thing that let him tell her the story at all, from the perspective of a man whom it could not so badly hurt. He had handed her the truth now, unasked, myth-nested, and she thought the Zeus-beloved king of Ithaka himself could not have done a better job. Then she saw how her silence told him that she had taken the allusion, and she did not know what to say next.

They had never been at a loss for words with one another, even—perhaps especially—other people's words, bridging with apostrophe and epigram the small halts and hurts where the soft places inside Rose's head ran awkwardly against those inside Hannibal's; if some part of her would always shy at an unexpected movement from even a man as gentle as Hannibal, she had watched him turn inward before from remarks as innocuous as the relay of news from her relatives in Grand Isle, and one or the other of them had always found the right way to move the conversation on, or at least turn it to the cooking or laundry or book-buying at hand. Sometimes there had been Benjamin, who knew both their secrets and betrayed no one, though she felt sure he had seen how intently she studied the groom's side at the wedding of the young Viscount Foxford, his unmusical hands that were still as lean and clever-fingered as if they had been born for strings and a bow, his uncle whose jaundiced, sun-puffed face was remarkable only for its eyes of a very particular, familiar darkness: the missing variable of the equation, the hypothesis for which she would have to wait for proof. More often there had been only themselves and their libraries. They had read all the same tragedies and comedies, the same revenges, the same recognition scenes. She was not finding what she wanted in her memory of Euripides, or Sophokles, or the late romances of Shakespeare. Another man's wife, she stood close enough to reach her hand out and touch another woman's husband, and realized that was not the important thing at all.

"κερδαλέος," Rose said softly, over the creak and slap of the _Triton_ riding at anchor beyond the gull-littered marshes of La Belize, the drum of her blood and the look on Hannibal Sefton's face, "κ᾽ εἴη καὶ ἐπίκλοπος ὅς σε παρέλθοι  
ἐν πάντεσσι δόλοισι, καὶ εἰ θεὸς ἀντιάσειε.  
σχέτλιε, ποικιλομῆτα, δόλων ἆτ᾽, οὐκ ἄρ᾽ ἔμελλες,  
οὐδ᾽ ἐν σῇ περ ἐὼν γαίῃ, λήξειν ἀπατάων  
μύθων τε κλοπίων, οἵ τοι πεδόθεν φίλοι εἰσίν.  
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε, μηκέτι ταῦτα λεγώμεθα, εἰδότες ἄμφω  
κέρδε᾽, ἐπεὶ σὺ μέν ἐσσι βροτῶν ὄχ᾽ ἄριστος ἁπάντων  
βουλῇ καὶ μύθοισιν, ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἐν πᾶσι θεοῖσι  
μήτι τε κλέομαι καὶ κέρδεσιν: οὐδὲ σύ γ᾽ ἔγνως  
Παλλάδ᾽ Ἀθηναίην, κούρην Διός, ἥ τέ τοι αἰεὶ  
ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι παρίσταμαι ἠδὲ φυλάσσω,  
καὶ δέ σε Φαιήκεσσι φίλον πάντεσσιν ἔθηκα,  
νῦν αὖ δεῦρ᾽ ἱκόμην, ἵνα τοι σὺν μῆτιν ὑφήνω . . ."

He did not look like anyone but himself, standing across the tiny cabin in his best-brushed antique coat and his permanent faint air of fatigue, but she did not realize until the fiddler moved how afraid she had been that he was going to. As formally as though he had just finished some classical piece by Mozart or Bach, though his violin had been left for safekeeping in the Januarys' rambling house on Rue Esplanade and the music he played by himself was almost always half-improvised and Irish, Hannibal bowed to her and sat down promptly on the edge of the narrow bunk. Above them, men were beginning to shout about lines and sheets and the other technical business of setting sail that she had been unable to observe from the pilot boat without her spectacles; with their gold-rimmed lenses settled securely now on the bridge of her nose, Rose glanced quickly at the cabin door, then longingly away. There would be other ships before Haiti and home, perhaps even one with similar rigging if they had a sea-god's luck instead of spite. She could always make Hannibal draw her diagrams: no one would reprimand a white man leaning on the rail, jotting notes of his travels or his fancies of the world he inhabited. He had always been pleased to aid her examinations of the world they knew they lived in, between pages and outside them.

From the margin of sheets and mattress that even his thin frame occupied alarmingly, Hannibal drew a steady breath that rasped only slightly in his throat and said, " _Gratias mille ago_ , Grey-Eyes. In recompense for the time this charade has already cost you from that clear-viewed study at which you excel, I should build you a telescope when we got back to New Orleans, had we world enough and time and I any ability to use a hammer without risking both my thumbs. Until then, would you like to have first go at this bunk? I'm almost certain we can get at least half of each of us on here, which leaves us until Havana to figure out what to do with the rest."

**Author's Note:**

> I had the central allusion in my head for six months before I wrote this story. All of the Greek is Homeric; the title means "upon the wine-dark sea." Rose is quoting _Odyssey_ 13.291–303. It is the first part of what the goddess Athene says when she encounters Odysseus on the shore of Ithaka, which he does not yet know is his own country; she takes the form of a shepherd boy to tell him where he is (Ἰθάκης γε καὶ ἐς Τροίην ὄνομ᾽ ἵκει—"the name of Ithaka reaches even to Troy") and in return he tells this new stranger a complete whopper about his identity—one of his Cretan lies, framing himself as a man who fought at Troy and killed someone he shouldn't have on the way home and ever since has had a hell of a time getting home, but is definitely not Odysseus the missing king of Ithaka, just some dude from Crete with a totally different set of problems, totally, thanks ever so. And instead of taking offense at his deception, Athene is flat-out delighted:
> 
> _He would have to be all chance and guile, whoever would get past you_   
>  _in any kind of trickery, even if it were a god who came up against you._   
>  _You troublemaker, shape-changer, untiring of tricks,_   
>  _even on your own ground you would never give up_   
>  _all those ruses and those clever stories that are dear as nature to you._   
>  _But come, we will talk no more of these things, both of us experienced_   
>  _in guile, since you are far and away the best of mortals_   
>  _at schemes and stories, while I among the gods am famous_   
>  _for craft and cleverness—and did you not recognize_   
>  _Pallas Athene, Zeus' daughter, who has always_   
>  _stood by you in every trouble and come to your defense_   
>  _and made you dear to all the Phaiakians_   
>  _and who has come here now to weave craft with you?_
> 
> The German comes from Franz Schubert's "Der Tod und das Mädchen"— _Do not trouble me_ and _Give me your hand, you fair and tender form_. Written December 2016.


End file.
